


and all of this time we were dreaming aloud

by epistolic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 06:36:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People talk about her in the corridors, the girl with no name, the runt, the orphan, the girl who dug her nails into a woman’s eyes once and <i>ripped</i>. The girl with nothing to fight for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and all of this time we were dreaming aloud

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from [my LiveJournal](http://www.livejournal.com/epistolic)!

He comes from a long line of Victors, a ferocity bred into his blood. 

For the first two years she does nothing but watch him – watching is a thing that Clove does best. She’s small, and fast, and when she wants to be she’s as quiet as a cat. He’s four years older than her; the other trainees give him a wide berth in the streets; his eyes are the colour of cornflowers. He laughs like a knife in the back.

The first time she steps into the training hall, she’s eight, and she’s half the size of everyone else. Most of them are sturdily built, well-fed. Most of them have families. There are fees involved in training, blood and gold; Clove has too much of one and none of the other.

She can see him watching from the sparring mat, a curved blade in his hand. His mouth scooped doubtfully to one side. 

She lifts her chin up.

\--

He doesn’t talk to her, because she’s young and because knowing her will not be an advantage. 

Very little of Clove is an advantage.

Later, on the train speeding towards the Capitol, he will look at her like she’s mad. Like the way she’d shoved her way onto the stage – _I’ll do it_ , snapped into the air like a challenge – had made her firmly beyond his comprehension. 

It’s not the volunteering which puzzles him. It’s _her_ , thirteen, not at all pretty, fierce and sharp and as dimly-lit as the tunnels she’d spent more than half of her life in. It’s what she _wants_.

“Why’re you doing it?” he asks her once, over breakfast.

“Doing what?”

He stares at her. She still eats in the old way – quick and darting, like it might all disappear. “This.”

“Why are _you_ doing it?”

“I got my family. You know.” She’s noticed this in all of them over the years, the absolute inability to explain what they are all _doing_. “Got to keep up the tradition.”

“So you’re doing it because of other people. You’re not doing it because _you_ want to.”

His eyes flash. “Of course _I_ want to. That’s why I’m here.”

“Alright, then,” she says, spearing her knife through the shell of a lobster. It yields with a satisfying crack, the sound of finger-bones giving way, and she smiles at him. “I’m doing it because I want to.”

\--

They don’t give her a knife at first, because they’re not sure she has the strength to make knives count. They give her a spear, a bow and arrows, a studded mace. They give her a wire to twist around her enemy’s neck – the first time she tries it she’s transfixed by the spurt of blood, the colour of a man’s throat on the palms of her hands. She always pulls too hard.

People talk about her in the corridors, the girl with no name, the runt, the orphan, the girl who dug her nails into a woman’s eyes once and _ripped_. The girl with nothing to fight for.

In the end, she finds she likes knives the best. There is something brutally poignant about the whistle of soaring metal and the thud of a honed point into flesh and bone. Back in the tunnels, scurrying through the muck of a district with too much money in too few people’s hands, she’d felt the press of the earth all around her – stone and metal and weight – felt the terrible power of it all, ready to crush her at a moment’s notice. 

It’s the tunnels that come back to her, even now. She sleeps with a knife in her hand at all times. She’s made a pact with the dirt, with the cold of fresh steel, with desperation. 

_Never again._

\--

“What happened to your parents?”

He asks her this to catch her off guard. For a split second she’s frozen, her heart landing hard in her mouth, and his spear gets into her blind spot and slams a bruise into the underside of her ribs.

She’ll never learn to forgive him for that. For hurting her with nothing more than air.

\--

The night before the Games, he finds her in their shared living room, sitting on the floor. She hears him long before he appears; he’ll never quite master how to be silent. He’s never had to.

“Ready for tomorrow?” he says, dropping onto the carpet next to her.

It’s a stupid question. She doesn’t answer it.

“What am I saying,” he amends after a while. “Of course you’re ready. Deadly little Clover.”

Her spine goes stiff and her fingers dig into the carpet. He’s at least a head taller than her and she can feel his warmth through the inches between them, the sword-prick of his eyes. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? It’s your name, isn’t it?”

“It’s my mother’s name.”

“So what? Fact is it’s still your name. That’s what they call you.”

He’s doing it on purpose. He’s still watching her face, like he’s waiting for a muscle of hers to slip, so she turns and stares him right in the eye. She realises, abruptly, that she doesn’t like him at all. But that only makes things easier from here on.

“No-one calls me that. Everyone calls me Clove.”

“Clover’s a prettier name than Clove.”

She bares her teeth at him. “I’ve always wanted to be _pretty_ ,” she says, and pushes herself up onto her feet.

\--

In the arena, the first knife she throws is aimed at Katniss Everdeen.

Cato wants her, but Clove wants her more. During the interviews, she’d felt an almost blinding rage – _how dare she, how dare she_ – this girl who’d stepped into her sister’s place, who’d pushed through the Peacekeeper ranks like throwing her heart into the mud: _Take me, instead. Let me die for her._

“Dibs on the girl from Twelve,” Cato says, smearing blood all over his chin as he absently wipes away sweat. “No-one touches her. She’s mine.”

“No,” Clove says.

He lunges for her, but she’s ready for it and the handle of her knife digs into the socket of his left eye. Not hard – she’s not trying to kill him, yet – but it stops him in his tracks.

The boy from ten is still alive and Marvel looks over at them, annoyed. “Are you two done?”

Cato pulls himself away from her. He spits onto the ground at her feet.

“Yeah,” Clove says, every part of her alight, the blood-rush heady with its metallic taste. She doesn’t sheath her knife, tucks it into her palm like the open threat it is. “I’m done.”

\--

There had been a debate over whether or not she would be allowed into the Games. The Reaping, for District 2, was nothing more than tradition; the real selection came after, in the next day or two, as the other tributes from the outlying districts meandered their way to the Capitol.

Clove had worn black to the interview in the Justice Building. Black, and the chill of a knife in her sleeve.

“I can’t believe they let you in,” Cato said later as they stood beside their chariot, waiting for the signal to mount. “You’re too young.”

She smoothed down the front of her tunic. “I’m old enough.”

“No, you’re not. And you’ve got no connections into the selection board. So how did you do it?”

“I impressed them.”

“How?”

The signal rang, and she reached out a hand to grasp the side of the chariot. He caught her wrist before she had the chance to step up – his grip was hard, bruising, but she didn’t flinch.

“You’ve got nothing and you don’t care about money,” he said. “You don’t give a damn what people say about you, or what they think. You’re not after fame or attention. You’re thirteen, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you don’t have to be here. You’ve got _nothing_ to fight for.” He let go of her, but only just. “So how did you convince them to let you in?”

She shoved him back a step and pushed up onto the chariot, her wrist burning a hot bracelet. “Just that.”

“Just what?”

“Just _that_ ,” she repeated, and took her place. “There are too many tributes with something to fight for, don’t you think? It gets boring.”

“So they let a kid in for _interest’s sake_? That’s pathetic.”

“No, it’s not,” Clove said, lazily. The chariot shifted as Cato pulled himself up, the horses stamping as they fought to stay in place. “People with something to fight for, all they can think about is _surviving_.”

“You’re not going to try and survive.”

“I’m going to try and _have fun_ ,” she said. “I’m going to give them a show.”

The Capitol anthem began.

\--

On the fourth night, Marvel doesn’t come back.

“You think he’s dead?” Cato says, bent over and trying to clean his sword on the grass. He’s right-handed; he never lets Clove anywhere near his left flank. 

“Maybe. We’ll know in a moment.”

“Heard a cannon earlier.”

“Don’t you ever have anything to say except the obvious,” she snaps, suddenly annoyed. She kicks at the coals of their fire. “I was with you when the cannon went off the first time, and I was with you when the cannon went off a second time. I was _there_.”

Cato’s mouth twists into an ugly line. “Maybe I should fix that, then.”

“Maybe you should,” Clove says, her chin tilting up. Her finger curls around the neck of a knife.

She has it singing through the air before Cato has even moved an inch. It’s headed for his heart, because although the neck would be faster, she likes the sound of steel cracking its way through bone more than she likes the sound of blood. 

His sword comes up at the very last moment and the knife veers away into the trees with a metallic clang. She’s up on her feet already; her next knife grazes the side of his neck. She sees him spin a little from the momentum, sees the quick rise of blood, but then before she’s completely ready he’s barrelled all of his weight into her and knocked her onto the dirt. 

She gets a blade to the centre of his chest at the same time as he gets the sword to the crook of her neck.

They stay there for a long while, just breathing into each other’s air. Cato shifts a little – he’s hard against her hip – she digs the knife deep enough to draw blood, but not deep enough to count.

After a moment, Cato laughs. “Is this it then, Clover? You want to do it this way?”

“Don’t _you_?” she counters back at him.

There’s a hot trickle down the side of her neck, a cut from where the sword is pressed up against her throat. Her heartbeat’s thundering high in her ears. For a brief, ecstatic moment, putting all of her weight behind the knife in her hand, she feels like she’s flying.

The Announcement saves his life.

\--

She hasn’t really thought about making it back. 

Cato talks of Victory, of going home – always that word, _home, home_ – Clove gets sick of it.

She can’t quite picture a place she wants to go back to. She has a feeling that she knew a place once, that she loved a place once, but it’s the sort of deep, half-lit feeling that no-one can put into words. On most nights, it leaves her alone; but then on some nights when her guard is down it creeps up on her, leaden, crushing, the sort of suffocating pain that one might get just moments before a heart attack.

\--

On the morning of her death, Clove pins Katniss Everdeen to the grass and draws a knife blade across the skin of her cheek.

She’s in the open and she makes for an easy target. Cato is not the type to watch someone else’s back. A part of her is screaming that she should just do it already, the part that got her out of the tunnels, steel, a slash across the throat – but another part of her is _furious_. 

She wants to peel this girl apart on the ground, this girl with a lover to fight for her, this girl with a sister and a mother to go on home to, this girl with every reason to live.

_What do you have that I don’t have –_

Something grabs her by the back of her neck.


End file.
